The escapade on boats and bikes in the Moluccas was the final episode in the hectic travel that I had engaged in during 2013. With much less that I could productively do in Sri Lanka, I had gone as noted previously to Karnataka and Bhutan and Brunei and Tunisia. In between I had gone to England, as I tried now to do once a year.

This time the main reason was the 70th birthday of my former Dean, who had been infinitely kind and helpful to me during my 8 years in Oxford. He had remained a fast friend, arranging for the College to give me membership of the Senior Common Room and Dining Rights when I went back for any length of time, booking me guest rooms for short stays, and when that became expensive allowing me to stay in his rooms. He had long moved out of College himself by then, but he had continued till he retired to entertain generation after generation of undergraduates with the ebullience of his twenties, when we had first met.

But early in the new millennium he decided to take early retirement, for he said the College was changing beyond recognition. He was stunned when one of the new history tutors asked what it was to do with him, when Leslie suggested he visit one of his students who was in hospital. The old pastoral system seemed to have died away, with the Chaplain abdicating responsibility so that dealing with students with problems fell on the shoulders of the former College Secretary, who had been eased out of that position when the new Senior Tutor banned morning coffee in the College Office. That was the time at which dons met informally to compare notes, under the eagle eye of the College Secretary who had run the administration practically single handed for years, with the support of very glamourous assistants. But the practice, which lasted for a decade after she went, was resented by the supposedly professional administrators the new Master had brought in, and a dull bureaucracy took over.

Ironically, the Senior Tutor who had thought Morning Office Coffee and all that frivolous, presided over the worst years the College experienced with regard to examination results. She finally had to leave when it was clear the place would not recover on her watch. She was Belgian, which perhaps explains my Dean’s determination to vote for Britain to leave the Common Market, though just before the note he did note that it was clear, from a trip he made to the North, that the country at large was completely at odds with the elite on this issue. The fact that every single region of England except for London voted to leave seemed ample proof of this. Read the rest of this entry »